Sales addiction disorder

[ragdollsoft]

Possibly the best-and-worst thing I noticed about being an indie developer is the incredibly intense "sales addiction disorder" I seem to have acquired.

The disease for me started the day in which some guy from the UK sent me a 10 euro note via mail for a freeware game I had made. I felt a very wierd rushing down the spine. The note was certainly infected, and it passed me the dreaded disease, causing me to change all my games from freeware to shareware and start to want more and more and more.

Not so surprisingly, the addiction gets worst and worst as sales get better, leaving for terrible maniac depressive withdrawal symptoms in bad periods.

Symptoms range from the wild adrenaline rush you get when you discover that overnight you sold a number of games to the most profound depression when you realize that nobody bought anything in the last 24 hours.

Side effects include rushing in front of the comp in the morning thrilling to know how many sales the night brought, wasting time in front of the comp hoping that in the 30 minutes that you played bejewelled you've got at least one sale, and then checking trembling your email just you find out that no, you didn't sell anything, to just staring to your email account concentrating on creating a new sale: "now! sell! sell you bastard!".

Anyone else got the disease?

[amaranth]

Ha ha ha, add me to the list!

[DrWilloughby]

I had that for about 6 months. I'd check my sales every 30 minutes or so. These days I pay little attention to it as I know that the sales will only increase if I put out another game. But for 6 months it was almost as bad as a WoW addiction!

[Tertsi]

I had that for a while too, but less than two weeks if I remember correctly. It is crucial for your productivity to get over it.

[bignobody]

Ha! Now there's a problem I wish I had. Hard to get addicted to sales when there's been so few :(

[sillytuna]

Every now and again we get a royalty statement which makes me go wooooah, tho not often enough for my liking!

It's great when we see a good title of ours in the shops though. I remember starting out 11 years ago and rearranging the top ten in game stores where-ever I went.

[PoV]

A great solution to (half) hourly checking, thanks to Digg. Have windows not let you visit those sites durring your workday! :D

http://www.verysimple.com/blog/?p=55

[BIGZIPZ]

Ha! Now there's a problem I wish I had. Hard to get addicted to sales when there's been so few :(


Don't be downhearted, you still have the best name ever for your game.

[bignobody]

Don't be downhearted, you still have the best name ever for your game.
Thanks! As I've said in another thread, other than financially, I got everything I wanted out of the experience, so I'm not too downhearted :)

Regards,

[Coyote]

Man, I'm there. Although I have to survive withdrawal several times a month, as I often have to go more than a day between sales :(

[arcadetown]

I'd like to figure out how to make Outlook not ding if it's an email notification sorted to my orders folder. Very distracting.

[lennard]

Brian, I saw your 70K per month burn rate figure. I'd be really interested in knowing what a visitor to your site is worth to you and how much you pay to deliver them? Do you figure that you retain visitors or are you basically paying a set amount for each set of eyeballs and making more than you spend to get them?

[yanuart]

Haha I had that disorder too about 5-6 months ago. Now, I found that it's more nailbiting to wait for 1-2 weeks before I open my sales mailbox. Hey.. at least this addiction isn't bad your health.

[Escapee]

I have both the "sales addiction disorder" and "compulsive stat checking disorder". :o

When time were bad, i would go for a long jog in the park or shopping in hypermall to take away my attention from those bad stats on the screen .

I have a huge traffic plunge today so i 'm going for a long jog later and to mall afterward . Good period fuels my motivation. Bad period is my rest time. :D :D

[Emmanuel]

Both Jerome (our artist) and I were completely addicted to checking sales all the time with Funpause and set special sounds when we got emails from plimus. We never turned the sound off until the sale to BFG.. My best memory of the Funpause days was after Atlantis came out, and we had dinners at Jerome's house with both funpause-supported families, with the sales that kept ringing in the background while we were eating. :)

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Nexic]

I'd like to figure out how to make Outlook not ding if it's an email notification sorted to my orders folder. Very distracting.


Must be deafening!

[Matthew]

I rigged up realtime sales notification to our internal IRC bot. It also echos other things like SVN commits and the like. The sales notification looks like:

Flashbang: 1st-Party Sale (Plimus): Glow Worm purchased by Matthew Wegner (Tempe, AZ, US)

I've also rigged a few things to a text-to-speech engine (including AdSense clicks, which was just a touch of the madness).

[Jack Norton]

LOL ok, I think is impossible to beat that! :eek: